Chapter 602: Not an Afterthought

She painted the last section of hair and set the bowl down with a click.

"Nobody carries me down anything." She pulled the timer on her phone and set it for thirty-five minutes, then leaned her hip against the counter and looked at me in the mirror. "That's not a complaint. That's a fact. I'm the girl who carries herself. I'm the girl who walks into rooms and people clear the path because they're afraid of what happens if they don't. I'm the girl Aurora calls when somebody needs to be intimidated or when something needs to be broken and I am very good at breaking things."

Cherry candy. Chemical dye. The faint undertone of expensive perfume she wore like warpaint.

"But nobody picks me up."

I caught her wrist in the mirror.

Not her hand. Her wrist. Where the glove ended and bare skin began, where the pulse beat fast beneath my fingers, where the heat of her body bled through the latex and into my palm. Her violet contacts went wide and her lollipop stick tilted as her jaw tightened.

"What do you actually want?"

Addison looked at me in the mirror. Two people in a bathroom covered in newspaper and chemical fumes with three hostage coffee jellies lined up on the sink and death metal playing at a volume that would violate noise ordinances in most states. Her reflection showed the girl underneath everything, the one who slept with a stuffed bat named Vlad and wrote poetry in encrypted files and cried in a farmhouse when someone told her she was beautiful because nobody had ever bothered to say it before.

Four seconds of silence.

Four seconds where Addison Baxter did not speak, which was longer than Addison had been quiet since the ferry to Ventura when she fell asleep against Aurora's shoulder and her face went soft in a way that made her look eighteen instead of immortal.

"For you to remember I'm here when the princess starts costing you."

It landed harder than she meant it to.

I could hear it in the way her jaw locked after the words left her mouth, the way her wrist flexed inside my grip, the way her violet contacts dropped from mine in the mirror for half a second before she forced them back up. Addison Baxter did not regret what she said. She regretted that it sounded like begging, and Addison would rather walk through a hospital in nothing but spite and a trench coat than beg for anything that mattered.

I stood up from the stool.

The height difference put my chin above her eyeline, which was still a novelty after six weeks of being shorter than most of the women in my life. Addison's purple highlights were level with my mouth, and the lollipop stick poked toward my collarbone like a weapon she forgot she was carrying.

"I remember everything." I kept her wrist in my hand and turned to face her instead of the mirror. "I remember the classroom. I remember you asking me to tie you up because you were afraid you'd lose the nerve. I remember what you taste like when you're scared and I remember what you taste like when you're not. I remember that your left breast produces milk with more cayenne than the right one and I remember that you sing lullabies when you think I'm not listening and I remember that you walked through a hospital lobby in lingerie at one in the morning because Aurora called and said I was dying and you chose to come."

Addison's lips parted around the lollipop stick.

"You are not an afterthought." I released her wrist and brought my hand up to the side of her face, thumb tracing the line of her jaw beneath the heavy eyeliner. "You are the reason I had enough days left to carry anybody anywhere."

The lollipop stick fell out of her mouth and bounced off the newspaper-covered floor.

Addison grabbed the front of my jeans with both gloved hands and pulled me toward her hard enough that my hip hit the counter and one of the coffee jellies rocked on its base. Her mouth found mine with the urgency of someone who'd been holding a scream in her chest for two days and decided to convert it into something more productive.

She kissed like she fought. With commitment, with contact, with her whole body contributing to the effort. Her hands left black dye smudges across the waistband of my jeans as she hauled me closer, and I felt the latex of her gloves warm and slick against my bare stomach when she pressed her palms flat against my abs. The chemical taste of the dye mixed with cherry candy and something darker that was pure Addison, that coffee and chocolate flavor I'd catalogued in the farmhouse and the dungeon and the classroom and every other impossible room we'd built from scratch.

I backed her against the sink and her ass hit the counter hard enough that coffee jelly number two tipped over and rolled into the basin. She didn't notice. Her legs came up and hooked behind my thighs, pulling me between her knees where the bike shorts had ridden up to show the pale inner skin of her upper leg. I put both hands on the counter on either side of her hips and leaned in until our foreheads touched and she had nowhere to look but directly at me.

"You're here." I spoke against her mouth, close enough that she could feel the shape of each word. "You're not background. You're not a backup. You're the girl who carried a box of hair dye up four flights of stairs and lined up my debts on the sink like she was making a point."

"I was making a point." Her voice came out rough, the goth rasp stripped of its performance layer. "The point is that you owe me three coffee jellies and you owe me this hair color and you owe me your attention for the next thirty-four minutes while the dye sets and I swear to every god that hasn't tried to kill you that if you check your phone I will manifest both scythes in this bathroom."

"I won't check my phone."

"You better not."

The timer on the counter read thirty-two minutes remaining.

Addison kissed me again, slower this time, her gloved hands leaving black streaks up my ribs as she explored the terrain of muscle that hadn't existed when we first met on a ferry. Her fingers found the leopard scars and traced them with the attention of someone who understood what combat marks meant on a body, who'd earned her own collection through years of swinging weapons heavy enough to make her forearms ache.

We stayed like that for a while. Her sitting on the counter with her legs around me and her black-gloved hands painting abstract patterns of dye across my chest and stomach. Me standing between her knees with my hands in her purple-streaked hair and my mouth finding the spots behind her ear and along her throat that made her forget she owned a vocabulary of profanity extensive enough to fill a dictionary.

When the timer finally went off, Addison shoved me toward the shower with a hard slap on the hip that left a perfect black handprint on my jeans.

"Rinse. Don't use my conditioner. The expensive bottle is Aurora's and she will know."